Diapause and the allure of a Mexican holiday

Mayflies have a lifespan of 24 hours. It will experience high noon, or the middle of the night just once. Sunrise to sunrise, as the case may be, and one sunset in one's entire lifetime. There would be no other sunsets that it could compare the one it would chance upon with.

Once in a lifetime morning, and if it shines all day that day, it would have no knowledge of rain. Just those 24 hours, the lives of some are over within a few hours.

On certain days, 24 hours would be a video editing session, or maybe a dress rehearsal and fine tuning of the production design in time for the following day's opening night. Other times, that would be two carafes of coffee. a trip to and from the kids' school, three loads of laundry, a lunch of left overs, a trip to the market, another trip to and from the kids' school, a drink, an hour at the kitchen, a dinner, and a night's sleep, then wake up for the... if I were a mayfly, there would be no repeat of those two carafes of coffee.

Koi fish live up to over 200 years. Now I didn't know that. Those colorful fish we throw bread crumbs at at friends' garden ponds, restaurant frontages. That's about five times what I've experienced so far. You can take up medicine ten times and still have a hundred years of medical practice. At what point do they get bored? The first century? The hundred and seventy fifth birthday? It takes me about four to five months to stage a play from the time I come across an existing script that stimulates me to the time the cast takes the last curtain call up here. At twice a year, starting in my 20's. I could have the chance to stage 360 stories on stage.

Monarch butterflies live for just a few weeks month, a little over a month from the egg to the adult stage. They spend most of their lives not as butterflies... that happens only in the latter third or quarter of their life cycle. Now that's interesting.

Yeah, it's never too late.

I read too that monarchs can live up to as much as 10 times their expected lifespan... if they happen to enter diapause and take a winter vacation to Mexico.

Hm.

43, and so far so good. Mexico's too far right now, I'll be fine with a fine sunset, a fine one out of a lot more, I hope.

It's not a Monarch, but a pretty one nonetheless

Erasing Baguio from the map...

...or at least what Baguio is,was, all about.

That's what SM City Baguio, along with others like it who look at Baguio and only see a market, their bottom line. They're out to totally eradicate what's left of the city's former natural beauty, the quality of life that its residents were once privileged to live, its culture, its heritage. SM City Baguio is the ruin of the City of Baguio.

SM City Baguio announced recently that it's all-systems-go for their ill-conceived expansion plan - the Temporary Restraining Order issued by the Supreme Court in 2015 only covered the cutting and earth-balling of trees, they claimed, and not the total eradication of the hill that served as the birthplace of Baguio as a city.

The Manila Standard trumpeted the expansion project's features that will allegedly "help absorb the impact of climate change such as a Sky Park, a state-of-the-art sewerage treatment plant, and an underground rainwater catchment tank having a capacity of 7,432.54 cubic meters of water which could be used in mall operations." A man-made Sky Park in lieu of 182 trees that form one of the last remaining forest covers of the city's central business district that nature nurtured for decades in this age of climate change? I don't think so. Not surprisingly, anymore from this paper and writer, there was no mention of the protesters' justifications for their opposition to the project.

They forward their plan to build a state-of-the-art sewerage treatment plant and a rainwater catchment tank as if we should get on our knees and thank them for their beneficence, when these are among the least they can do when they built one the biggest mall in one of the smallest towns in terms of land area and resources in Northern Luzon. The city's residents still have to contend with rationed water, where did they think they should get their water to supply their over 300 stores. The city is still plagued by a garbage crisis, what exactly are they doing not to add to Baguio's burden?

So the Supreme Court has spoken, they said. Well, we can say this: the movement that has come to be known as Save 182 turned to our legal system to seek justice (a salute to our legal representatives led by Cheryl L. Daytec-Yañgot and Christopher Donaal), while SM City Baguio did all it can to find loopholes in it to perpetuate a crime against a city's, a people's constitutional right, its history, its heritage (thanks to their legal mercenaries at the ACCRA and Fortun law offices).

I've discussed this issue extensively in my previous posts, and after four years of struggling to save what's left of our beautiful city from corporate greed, do we now just raise our hands and accept defeat?

We may be facing a loss in the battle to save Luneta Hill, but the struggle to save Baguio from SM's insatiable greed, along others like it, along a corrupt bureaucracy and political system, must go on.

The future of Baguio depends on this struggle. Our quality of life, our lives, in fact, and those of our children's children, depend on it.